What happens when you give a man the power to change the world? What happens when you force on that man the responsibilities of those actions? I don’t know, but I do know that Nathan Edmondson and Alison Sampson’s “Genesis” is worth checking out because of those exact reasons.
Written by Nathan Edmondson
Illustrated by Alison Sampson
A trippy journey of creation and destruction as one man finds himself with the ability to manifest anything by thinking it—only to learn that with seemingly unlimited power comes unstoppable terror.
Comics, as a medium, get to do fun things with story that other mediums very rarely get to do. Thanks to the unique combination of still, sequential images and words, the ideas and images presented on the page can be much larger than what physically appears on the page. Even when film extends out to things like Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, the grand ideas can be constrained because of the linear experience of watching a movie. Comics don’t have that because, due to the sequential images, they can be experienced at the discretion of the reader. An image or idea can be presented for the reader to stop and contemplate on or they can rush through to the end and go back to absorb it. It’s entirely their prerogative.
With that in mind, “Genesis”, the Image published one-shot from Nathan Edmondson and Alison Sampson, is exactly the kind of comic that works because it’s a comic. It’s the kind of story that could only be told in the format it’s in. What is that story, you might ask? Well, that’s the tricky part. Not just because describing it would likely ruin the impact of the story, but also because the story is hard to describe in and of itself. Let’s just say a man is given the power to change the world to his whims and, as you might have guessed, things don’t exactly go to plan.
I’ve talked a lot about Nathan Edmondson recently. What I found was that his #1s for Marvel were serviceable to the stories he was trying to tell, but that with that foundation built he was able to create a much better second issue. With one-shots there is no such luxury. Thankfully, he doesn’t need it. The writing of “Genesis” evokes one part Terrence Malick, one part Terry Gilliam and one part David Lynch, throwing the reader into this dream-like hyper-reality that, thanks to Alison Sampson’s boundary-erasing art, draws the reader into this tale of woe and forboding with in the first three pages of the story. The artwork from Sampson actually goes a long way in making this one-shot work.
Sampson’s art is incredibly loose, creating a rather detailed and stylised world, but with a certain detachment from it. This is partially because of the loose, abstract pencil work that allows Sampson to let the mind of the reader infuse it with a sense of a reality, but also because of her rather liberal approach to page design. The walls of panels are basically non-existent and details can bleed across the panels even before the walls of reality begin to fall apart. When that does start to happen, though? Sampson then uses her architectural background as an artist to create an abstract world that feels like early career Jae Lee (think “The Sentry” more than “Batman/Superman”) crossed with late career Picasso. What this allows is for Edmondson writing to shine through the abstraction of Sampson’s art and tell a tale of cause and effect brilliantly.
However, for as abstract as Sampson’s art is, that sometimes leads to it being rather stiff and uneven. For as non-existent as the borders of panels are, so too is a sense of sequential flow between panels. It’s something that really throws off the book and makes some pages feeling disjointed as characters move from panel to panel with no real sense of flow. Instead they just jump from position to position in stiff and awkward poses. Sampson’s art is gorgeous in its abstraction and world-building when singled down to looking at a single panel at a time, but unfortunately there’s something lacking when they are put together in sequence.
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“Genesis” is a very harsh morality tale disguised by the abstraction of it’s storytelling and artwork. It’s the kind of work that has a Message embedded in it from the start, but instead of coming off as some kind of afterschool special, Edmondson and Sampson use the unreality of their work to blindside the reader with the message in hindsight. Edmondson is also incredibly smart in how he constructs the complete unreality of the world in the story by posing questions to the reader that the story couldn’t possibly hope to answer, but manages to eschew feeling pointless or frustrating by posing them through the lens of the unreal. It leaves the true meaning of the story to be interpreted by the reader without leaving them in the dark as to what is to be interpreted. Like using the story as a mirror held up to its audience, Edmondson questions how they view the changing of the world and the destruction of it by those in power and creates the subtlest suggestion of “Well, what are you going to do about it?” that leaves the book feeling like the genesis of the idea of changing the world.
Ultimately, Edmondson and Sampson have created a thoughtful and challenging one-shot that, while not perfect, is still aiming high enough that when it works it transcends any problems it has. Edmondson’s writing and Sampson’s artwork go hand-in-hand to tell a morality tale disguised by the abstract tale of a man trapped by the power he is given that pays homage to everyone from Lewis Carroll to Terry Gilliam to David Lynch. It’s a fable of the consequences of using influence to change the world and it’s the kind of story that is more important in the telling than in the execution. For that, whatever flaws this story may have, the story it’s trying to tell almost entirely supersedes them.
Final Verdict: 7.8 – It seems almost arbitrary to put a score on this book, but it’s definitely worth checking out regardless.
